LOYAL OPPOSITION: Honor and Integrity, Bush-style

There ought to be a SWAT team of historians, ready at a moment's notice to don jumpsuits with leather elbow-patches, race to the scene where history is being mugged, correct the record, and bring the malfeasant to justice. Such a crew was sorely needed recently when George Bush the First and his wife, Barbara, granted a New York Times reporter a rare interview to discuss the current presidential race. Speaking at their Kennebunkport, Maine, home, Bush predicted his son would triumph due to his pledge to "restore honor and integrity" to the Oval Office. "It isn't even debatable, in my view," the former President asserted. The elder Bush was talking as if the White House had been as clean as its name before that damn hillbilly moved in. That's why we need a rescue squad of historians. Bill Clinton's extracurricular activities may have spawned nostalgia for the Reagan-Bush White House years. And nostalgia waves usually come 20 years after the fact. In the 1970s, there was the 50s craze (American Graffiti and Happy Days); in the 1980s, 60s stuff was hot (The Big Chill soundtrack and Ronald Reagan); in the 1990s, the 70s fared well (disco and John Travolta). So perhaps now's the time to feel warm and fuzzy about the Reagan-Bush era and to yearn for George Bush the Second to revive his father's -- er -- Camelot. That is, until the historiams' ERT arrives.

The most amateur historian can show that the Oval Office inhabited by Reagan and Bush was as stained, if not more so, as that overseen by Clinton -- even if the stains were of a different nature. On the subject of "honor and integirty," let's recall the Iran-contra affair. When the news broke in 1986 that the Reagan-Bush Administration had sold weapons to the hostage-holding regime in Tehran and used the proceeds to wage a not-too-secret secret war in Central America, Vice President George Bush famously denied he had been "in the loop." In an autobiography he published in 1987 when he was running for president, Bush maintained he had only been vaguely aware of an effort to "reach out" to one of the Iranian factions. He explained that the Iran project had been "compartmentalized" and he had been left out in the cold. Moreover, he related, it was not until a month after the scandal's start that he obtained the chance to see "the picture as a whole" -- and this opportunity came when he was briefed by the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. His claim: he was so far removed from this operation that it took a senator to explain the details to him. Bush stuck to this know-nothing line throughout his 1988 campaign and election as president. Government documents subsequently released disclosed that Bush had attended many high-level administration meetings on the Iran initiative. But we don't have to trust that paper trail. In his private diary, Bush wrote of the Iran operation, "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there." His own words prove he lied to the public about his involvement in the sordid affair.

Bush was able to get away with such dishonorable behavior in part because he succeeded in withholding his diaries from Iran-contra investigators. In February of 1987, Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-contra independent counsel, requested Bush's calendars and diaries. But Bush did not turn over the material until December 1992 -- a month after he had lost his bid for reelection. He then claimed he had never been informed of the request by his lawyers. Unlike Clinton's Monica stonewall, Bush's Iran-contra coverup worked.

As Vice President, Bush had played a key role in one of the more troubling aspects of the contra half of the scandal. In 1984, the Reagan White House sought covert ways to circumvent congressional restrictions on aid to the contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and the administration's schemers considered encouraging other nations to provide support to the contras in exchange for favors from Washington. That is, they looked to foreign policy bribery. At one classified meeting, Bush recognized the drawback of such a plan. "How can anyone object to the U.S. encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas?" he said. "The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people could interpret this as some kind of exchange." Bush was in sync with Attorney General WIlliam French Smith, whose ofice had decided a quid pro quo of this nature would be illegal. But eight months later, Bush participated in one of these deals. He traveled to Honduras and helped delivered a message to President Suazo Cordoba: Washington would release economic assistance and military equipment then being withheld, providing -- wink, wink -- Suazo's regime aided the contras.